Sadly, the range of games on the new consoles for poker has been vastly limited; the poker boom brought about a plethora of bad (or worse) poker games for the last generation (PS2/GameCube/XBOX) that soiled the name of the poker video game. Combine that with free poker training and free poker play on most online poker sites, and it makes the prospects of selling the games rather difficult. The Wii has attempted to put out a few poker related video games, but none of them really have the backing or technology behind them to be more than novelties in the poker world.

Two of the five entries into the Wii poker world, Battle Poker and Sexy Poker, are little more than silly variants of poker, designed to take as little skill in poker as possible and instead use the “poker” as either a excuse to get an anime girl near naked, or to collect bombs for another. Two of the other entries are three years old; WSOP:TOC and Howard Lederer’s foray into the video game world, neither of which were hot poker news when launched. That leaves a final entry; Texas Hold’em Poker, which came out one year ago for the Wii. The board for the game on www.gamefaqs.com is completely empty, and when I took a spin on it with a free trial, the game was crude and quick; something I wasn’t expecting from a Wiiware product.

What does this mean for the state of poker video games on Wii? The prognosis isn’t good; there are no new games on the slate, the WSOP line has crumbled into just an online web based service, and no developers are looking towards branching back out into the Wii realm anytime soon. Poker, even no deposit poker, is a tricky mistress to present to the video game realm of children and adults alike; maybe someday a developer can get a solid, endorsed game together that players can really appreciate. Til then, we’re stuck with what we have on the Wii.